Why women’s soccer is so important to queer people

By Hannah Ryan, CNN

(CNN) — Someone dressed as Marge Simpson, complete with a gigantic blue wig and a lime green dress, belts out “Hot to Go!” by pop icon Chappell Roan to a rapt audience gathered inside a marquee in the middle of a field in the north of England.

There are several people in the large tent dressed as Keira Knightley’s character in “Bend it Like Beckham” – a movie beloved by queer people, and which is particularly popular with lesbians.

And elsewhere in the space, there are a number of Sporty Spice – of the Spice Girls fame – lookalikes wearing sweatpants, their hair scraped back into high ponytails. While Sporty Spice herself, otherwise known as Melanie Chisholm, is not gay, she holds a special place in the hearts of many queer women. Carabiners hang off the belt loops of those queuing at a bar and there are Pride flags being hoisted into the air.

Everywhere you look, there are queer signifiers.

This is Ball Together Now, an inclusive soccer festival for women and marginalized genders that was founded in 2022. It has yielded three successful events across the summers of 2023, 2024 and 2025. Non-professional teams from all over the United Kingdom, and sometimes even further afield, gather in Manchester and play soccer by day, before partying by night.

Many of the shirts worn by the teams are emblazoned with rainbows and many others adorn the names of Lionesses – the England women’s national soccer team – stars. There is no doubt that this is a distinctly queer event and one that reflects the significance of women’s soccer for LGBTQ+ people.

The women’s game has developed a reputation for being something of a haven for queer people – and Ball Together Now is a prominent example of that.

“I’ve never seen so many lesbians all in one tent!” Lois Kay, one of the organizers of Ball Together Now, told CNN Sports. “Our space is for everyone and anyone that feels it is a space for them. The fundamentals of BTN (Ball Together Now) are to ensure that inclusion is at the forefront of what we do. We wanted to create something that also specifically included trans and non-binary players.”

The festival even hosted its own “Blind Date,” in which LGBTQ+ soccer players looking for love were set up with potential matches, and the event was received with rapturous applause and laughter from its audience of other sweaty and muddy players looking to wind down after a day of hard-fought contests.

Attachment to the ‘Beautiful Game’

Loads of LGBTQ+ people watching and playing soccer together is not a sight unique to Ball Together Now. Many queer people feel drawn to the women’s game and the crowds at matches are often populated by LGBTQ+ fans. It’s common to see rainbow scarves around the necks of spectators and queer couples can often be spotted showing affection to one another in the stands.

“Arsenal women’s games are the only place you’d find as many lesbians and queer women as you would at Pride!” Emily Calder, an Arsenal women’s fan told CNN Sports. Calder attended the 2025 UEFA Women’s Euros with her girlfriend, in which England, who she was supporting, emerged victorious to repeat and defend its title.

Calder has been a Gunners fan since childhood and remembers, when she was a kid, asking her father if “girls were allowed to play” for the club. Throughout the years, though, she gradually felt that the environment at men’s games was not always a particularly friendly one, and as she got older, she drifted away from the sport.

The 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup reignited her love for soccer, however, and she was “bitten by the bug.”

Calder now regularly watches key members of the successful England squad – from captain Leah Williamson to clutch 2025 Euros penalty-taker Chloe Kelly and Beth Mead – play for Arsenal women at the Emirates Stadium in north London. She says she finds the atmosphere at women’s games much more welcoming to queer women than the men’s matches she grew up attending.

“There’s a shocking difference in the culture around the women’s game compared to the men’s. There are so many out gay women players and so few in the men’s game,” Calder adds.

Indeed, while a number of prominent players in the Women’s Super League – England women’s top-flight in soccer – and the National Women’s Soccer League in the US are gay, there are still very few out queer players in the top divisions within the men’s game. For example, there are currently no out LGBTQ+ players in the English Premier League, the most-watched soccer league in the world.

Josh Cavallo, a gay Australian soccer player who came out in 2021, recently told BBC Sport that “being gay in men’s soccer is a very toxic place.” He says he receives daily death threats and abuse on social media. When he told the public he was gay, he became the only openly gay top-flight male professional footballer in the world.

And instances of homophobic events are not uncommon in men’s soccer in both Europe and the US.

In June, two high profile players in France’s top division, Ligue 1, were handed bans for concealing the anti-homophobia badge on their club’s shirts. A fiery match between the US men’s national team (USMNT) and Mexico in 2023 had to end early because of homophobic chanting – an issue seen across a number of soccer leagues throughout recent years.

In sharp contrast, some of the world’s most famous women’s soccer players are out. Christen Press and Tobin Heath, who both starred for the US women’s national team (USWNT), are a married couple. Vivianne Miedema and Beth Mead, who used to be teammates at Arsenal, are in a relationship and even joked about the awkwardness of having to face each other as rivals for the Netherlands and England, respectively, at the 2025 Euros.

According to PinkNews, at least 78 players that competed at the 2025 Women’s Euros were out. Each nation’s squad included 23 players and 16 teams were present at the tournament, making up 368 players in total. That means that more than 1 in 5 competitors (or over 20%) at the 2025 Euros were out – a significant number. In a 2023 survey conducted by Ipsos across 30 countries around the world, 3% on average identified as lesbian or gay, while the average share of LGBTQ population averaged to 9%. Comparing to figures from the 2025 Euros, the numbers provide evidence that women’s soccer is a particularly unique space for queer people.

The relatively common sight of high-profile women’s soccer players being in relationships with teammates, or their opponents, is often a draw for LGBTQ+ people with no previous interest in the sport on any level – women’s or men’s.

“Lots of queer friends have come with me to Arsenal women’s games over the last few years, who weren’t remotely into soccer before, and that’s partly because the games have become kinds of queer gatherings,” Calder said. “Now, they’re hardened fans themselves.”

Women’s soccer’s reputation as a queer hotspot is also evident in the number of LGBTQ+ venues across the UK that now host crossover events that combine soccer and queer nightlife.

For England and Wales’ opening games at the 2025 Women’s Euros, Baller FC, a collective of women’s soccer fans based in London, hosted a party at a brewery aptly titled “Slaying the Field,” which screened queer short films centered around soccer, involved an arm wrestling competition presented by a lesbian bar on wheels known as the “Mobile Dyke Bar” and even descended into line dancing – a storied pastime that has become distinctly queer over the last few years.

As queer nightlife across the UK stutters – with data from the Greater London Authority showing that more than half of London’s LGBTQ+ venues have closed over the last 20 years – women’s soccer has come to represent something more than just a sport for queer people. It has inspired the creation of new, queer spaces such as Studs – which began as an online platform for women’s soccer fans and now hosts its own events at a gay cabaret bar – and demonstrated a desire among many LGBTQ+ people for community as traditional spaces wither.

For many queer people, women’s soccer has become an essential vehicle for connecting with others in the face of shrinking nightlife.

And for those that don’t really enjoy drinking or going to queer bars, women’s soccer also serves as a third space, as Laura Graham – who plays for a grassroots club called “Flaming Foxes” in Birmingham, England – points out.

“Usually, the only other time you’re around as many queer people as you are at women’s games is at gay clubs. But that’s not ideal if you don’t want to drink or you don’t enjoy late-night partying. But women’s soccer feels like it has something for everyone,” she told CNN Sports.

Graham says that the Flaming Foxes make up the “biggest queer friendship group I’ve ever had,” adding that Ball Together Now, the aforementioned LGBTQ+ soccer festival, was her “favorite weekend of the year.”

In the US, where the Trump administration has been curbing LGBTQ+ rights over the last year and has cut grants for research into LGBTQ+ health matters, women’s soccer has a long and proud history of not only being a welcoming home for LGBTQ+ people but also serving as a weapon of resistance against bigotry.

2019 Ballon D’Or Féminin winner Megan Rapinoe, a star member of the hugely successful USWNT team that won its fourth World Cup in 2019 and herself a lesbian, famously rebuked the first Trump administration by making it clear she would refuse to attend the White House if the team was invited to celebrate its win.

Rapinoe was backed by her teammates, including fellow American legend Ali Krieger, and went on to make it clear that she felt queerness was intrinsic to the success of that USWNT squad – telling reporters during the tournament that you “can’t win a championship without gays on your team.”

Rapinoe is regarded by many queer soccer fans as a hero, epitomizing why queer people so often feel at home in the world of women’s soccer. During the first Trump administration, the USWNT was a symbol of queer joy and resilience, even when LGBTQ+ individuals were facing a rolling back of their rights and progressive attitudes appeared to be facing a backlash.

Ed Fox, a fan of NWSL team Washington Spirit, is proud of the queer visibility that women’s soccer in the US has long provided.

“Firstly, the women’s game avoids a lot of the machismo and issues of toxic masculinity that are found in the men’s game,” he tells CNN Sports. “I think the USWNT has set a tone by its inclusivity that has welcomed and invited queer people to enjoy the team and the sport that much more.”

Speaking specifically about the USWNT team that included Rapinoe, Press, Heath and Krieger, Fox says that having such “powerful, vocal queer allies and heroes on that team made a huge difference,” with regards to queer visibility.

It is arguable that women’s soccer, by its very nature, is radical. For much of the 20th century, the women’s game was subjected to serious restrictions across the world and, in some countries, banned altogether.

For 50 years, women in England were banned from playing on Football League grounds – forcing them to play in parks and fields. In 1922, Canada banned women from playing soccer following the FA decision in England. Under General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, women were banned from playing the game until the Spanish transition to democracy in the late 1970s.

It has long attracted those that do not feel they have to follow the rules of a heteronormative society and it has historically served as a space for those defying traditional societal conventions. Partially, for this reason, it feels like a natural home for queer people.

For a long time, the women’s game operated on the margins of the dominant culture. Even now, as players from around the world have gained international stardom status, they are still battling for better pay and having to deal with harassment on the world’s biggest stage.

As the women’s game grows increasingly popular – setting new attendance records and breaking previous viewership figures on TV broadcasts – it is serving a bigger community than ever before. The sport is more visible than it has ever been and its branding is evolving to appeal to an array of audiences – but, according to fans, at its heart it remains a celebratory and joyous space for queer people.

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